Motivation

Motivation and willpower is an important factor for fitness success, but it's important to understand how it actually works, which is often wrongly conceptualized.

The brain is like a muscle.

Meaning that if you train it, it gets better. But likewise, as you use it, it gets tired. It might seem like in order to do something, especially if you are not used to it, it takes a tremendous amount of motivation in order to make yourself start doing it. This is normal. It will get better with practice. The more you do that thing, the easier it becomes over time. This applies to all aspects of fitness, and self-improvement in general for that matter.

Another important feature of this is that your "willpower muscle" gets trained with a variety of tasks that carry over to each other. You can build up your willpower muscle by training it with small non-overwhelming habits. This can and will translate to bigger habits.

The second aspect is just as important. Your willpower is a resource that gets spent, in the scientific literature, this is usually called ego depletion. Some aspects of it are a bit controversial, but we don't need to dive into the nuance here. The most important takeaway is that you don't have infinite energy. And "mental energy" is low, self-control is impaired. So if you have a task that is really hard mentally, and then you have to do another one right after, you may experience ego depletion, and it may seem close to impossible to have the willpower to complete that task.

This is worth keeping in mind when you're trying to do many hard things at once, especially if they are done sequentially. Make priorities in your life so that you can save your energy for what matters the most, or at least divide those tasks across different time periods. If weekly grocery shopping, meal prep, and house cleaning are all things that you hate and it takes a tremendous amount of mental energy to do, doing all of them in a row on a Sunday morning might not be the best approach. You might be ego depleted by the first or second task and you procrastinate on everything else!

We cave into impulses (low self control) when we're distracted, stressed and tired. For example, studies have found that students cramming for exams will eat more junk food, and people on a diet are more likely to cheat on their partners. Avoid putting yourself in that situation when possible.

Locus of control

There is an internal locus of control and an external locus of control. The internal is something you can change, it's within your hands. For instance, you can decide if you are going to McDonalds or you are not. There is no one who can stop you from either decision.

external locus of control means the opposite, something that you don't have power over. For instance, you can't change the fact that a coworker offered you a cookie.

This is important to remember because you should be mindful of what you have control over and what you can't, and allocate your time and effort accordingly. There is no point in dwelling about what you have no control over, but there is certainly a massive benefit in realizing what is in your power to change.

• You can't change what others think of you

• You can't change how others feel.

• You can't change what others say

• You can't change the beliefs of others

• You can't change the past

• You can't change the future

• You can't change external situations

However...

• You can have a positive attitude

• You can work on your health

• You can work on your relationships

• You can work on your productivity

• You can make better choices about your life

And in more direct fitness terms, focus on what you can do about your training or diet. You can't change the fact that you were offered a cookie, but you can politely decline the offer. You can even practice how you phrase it so that it feels more natural and you don't get cold feet. And you can even mention that you are on a diet so that there are less likely to offer it to you in the future.

This is also important to consider regarding what you do vs what results you are getting. You can't affect outcomes directly, all you can change are the inputs for those outcomes. If you didn't lose weight, you can't change that directly and magically lower your weight, but you can change the inputs that translate to that outcome. For instance, maybe you have been eating out too much.

Furthermore, sometimes what you can change is limited. You might be getting very poor sleep from a new baby, which you can't do anything about and it's making weight loss more difficult. That's OK. This is part of knowing the locus of control; focus on what you can do. You can't make your baby sleep all night, but you can meal prep in advance, or make healthy snacks more available, and so forth.

Delayed rewards

Part of what makes good choices so difficult is that you're often prioritizing a long-term goal over a short-term reward. This is very against the architecture of our brain because for survival purposes before modernity, any reward should be taken advantage of immediately.

You may want to improve your health so that you can still play with your grandkids decades from you, but that's very, very far in the future. Meantime, the cheeseburger is right there, right now.

A way to counter-act this impulse is to delay rewards. Impulses tend to be very short-term, and they are much easier to control if you force to extend the timeframe they operate in. I recommend a 10-minute rule for any impulse. Even if you decide to go ahead with the impulse, with whatever rationalization you have come up with, wait 10 minutes before acting upon it.

You will find that many times it's much easier to resist the impulse after the 10 minutes. Even better, this gets easier and easier over time. You are teaching your brain that impulses don't have to be acted upon.

License to Sin

When tend to feel bad when we do bad things and feel good when we do good things, unsurprisingly. Feeling good about making progress on a certain goal also has a tendency to make yourself give permission to counter-act a good action with a bad one. You feel like you deserve it, because you did something good, hence the "license to sin".

This applies to many goals. For instance, I feel good because I just did 1 hour of important work, so now I can watch some Netflix, I deserve it. Unfortunately, I still had 2h more hours of work to do, and I ended up spending that 2h on my sofa.

I see this over and over again with exercise, especially in complete beginners. People feel good about exercising, and then they reward themselves with food, often caloric food. It's great that they are exercising, but from a fat loss perspective, it's very easy to completely undo the work you just did. If you went to the gym for half an hour, you might have burned 200 calories or so. If you then celebrate with a pizza for dinner that has 1000 calories, that wasn't very productive.

This is not to say that you have to be perfect. You don't.

This does not mean that you can't have breaks or pleasurable activities. You can.

Nevertheless, it's an important feature of our psychology that we often derail our progress by disproportionally celebrating small wins, to the point when you end up making little progress. Make sure that you're rewarding yourself appropriately for your goals.

Even more absurdly, sometimes we reward ourselves by feeling like we have done something, when we actually haven't! For instance, you may feel good that you wrote a to-do list, and thus you deserve a reward. But of course, what actually matters is doing what is on the to-do list. Or that you finally signed up for a gym, although you haven't gone for your first session. Or that you hired a coach, but you haven't followed anything he has recommended. It's easy to think we have accomplished something, when sometimes we haven't.

The future self

Life often requires doing hard things, and it's hard to get the motivation to do them. Fortunately, there is a very easy fix for this. Instead of doing what you need to do, simply transfer the task to your future self! Now you don't have to worry about it.

Sounds ridiculous, right? But we do this all the time. I don't feel like going to the gym today, but I can do it tomorrow. It's important to remember that the future self is still you. And very likely, delaying tasks to the future, or throwing problems to the future you, doesn't solve anything. Very often, it makes it worse.

The reason why this is so appealing is that it allows us not to do the task, while at the same time having a justification for it. I'm not cleaning my house today, but it will get done tomorrow.

Don't create debt to your future self as if you are getting rid of responsibility. Be mindful that you're creating an excuse for yourself.

There is no "future you" that is full of energy, focused, diligent and loves vacuuming. There is a continuity between now and the future. Don't continuously live in the present and ignore the consequences of your behavior.

Pre-commit

It's much easier to achieve your goals if you pre-commit to them. That's one of the reasons why coaching is so useful. In addition to the knowledge and experience of a coach, you already signed up and spent the money. You might as well use it.

This can be used in a variety of ways. The most straightforward is a financial commitment, like coaching. However, it can be applied to other things, such as a year-long gym membership. But it doesn't have financial at all.

We like to appear coherent to others. We don't like when we say one thing, and then do another. You can pre-commit to a goal by saying to friends and families what you're going to do. Do you want to run a marathon? Tell your friends. It's a little awkward and depressing to then have to say that you're not running the marathon after all, and you have quit.

The underlying principle is whenever possible to "burn your ships". Avoid giving yourself an exit, or at least make that exit as hard and as uncomfortable as possible. If you want to avoid using a credit card, you can simply resist the temptation to use it. But it's much easier if you cut the credit card in half.

Close support and community

Humans are social creatures. It's much easier to stay motivated if you have social support.

By close support, I mean people close to you that are willing to help you through struggles. This often includes one's partner, close family and close friends. They are people you can deeply trust and they can support you at an emotional level. And if needed, at a practical level (for example, if they know you are on a diet, to eat out at a diet-friendly place).

The other is community, and this doesn't involve people very close to you, but people that share the same goals you are pursuing. Your partner might be super supportive of you, but unless he's in the trenches with you, sometimes it's hard to relate to your struggles and specific problems you are having. This is why being part of a community is important, people who are like you.

This can take many forms. Of course, ideally, this would be a community in-person. For instance, people in your gym. But in our modern age, this often occurs online. You can find like-minded people on a Facebook group, Reddit, forum, etc. It doesn't really matter where it is, what matters is that the people in that community are sharing the journey that you are on.